What Is Reverse Engineering?

Engineering is the profession involved in designing, manufacturing, constructing,

and maintaining of products, systems, and structures. At a higher level, there are
two types of engineering: forward engineering and reverse engineering.
Forward engineering is the traditional process of moving from high-level
abstractions and logical designs to the physical implementation of a system. In
some situations, there may be a physical part without any technical details, such
as drawings, bills-of-material, or without engineering data, such as thermal and
electrical properties.
The process of duplicating an existing component, subassembly, or product,
without the aid of drawings, documentation, or computer model is known as
reverse engineering.
Reverse engineering can be viewed as the process of analyzing a system to:
1. Identify the system's components and their interrelationships
2. Create representations of the system in another form or a higher level of
abstraction
3. Create the physical representation of that system
Reverse engineering is very common in such diverse fields as software
engineering, entertainment, automotive, consumer products, microchips,
chemicals, electronics, and mechanical designs. For example, when a new
machine comes to market, competing manufacturers may buy one machine and
disassemble it to learn how it was built and how it works. A chemical company
may use reverse engineering to defeat a patent on a competitor's manufacturing
process. In civil engineering, bridge and building designs are copied from past
successes so there will be less chance of catastrophic failure. In software
engineering, good source code is often a variation of other good source code.
In some situations, designers give a shape to their ideas by using clay, plaster,
wood, or foam rubber, but a CAD model is needed to enable the manufacturing
of the part. As products become more organic in shape, designing in CAD may be
challenging or impossible. There is no guarantee that the CAD model will be
acceptably close to the sculpted model. Reverse engineering provides a solution
to this problem because the physical model is the source of information for the
CAD model. This is also referred to as the part-to-CAD process.
Another reason for reverse engineering is to compress product development
times. In the intensely competitive global market, manufacturers are constantly
seeking new ways to shorten lead-times to market a new product. Rapid product
development (RPD) refers to recently developed technologies and techniques
that assist manufacturers and designers in meeting the demands of reduced
product development time. For example, injection-molding companies must
drastically reduce the tool and die development times. By using reverse
engineering, a three-dimensional product or model can be quickly captured in
digital form, re-modeled, and exported for rapid prototyping/tooling or rapid
manufacturing.
Following are reasons for reverse engineering a part or product:

1. The original manufacturer of a product no longer produces a product

2. There is inadequate documentation of the original design
3. The original manufacturer no longer exists, but a customer needs the
product
4. The original design documentation has been lost or never existed
5. Some bad features of a product need to be designed out. For example,
excessive wear might indicate where a product should be improved
6. To strengthen the good features of a product based on long-term usage of
the product
7. To analyze the good and bad features of competitors' product
8. To explore new avenues to improve product performance and features
9. To gain competitive benchmarking methods to understand competitor's
products and develop better products
10.The original CAD model is not sufficient to support modifications or current
manufacturing methods
11.The original supplier is unable or unwilling to provide additional parts
12.The original equipment manufacturers are either unwilling or unable to
supply replacement parts, or demand inflated costs for sole-source parts
13.To update obsolete materials or antiquated manufacturing processes with
more current, less-expensive technologies
Reverse engineering enables the duplication of an existing part by capturing the
component's physical dimensions, features, and material properties. Before
attempting reverse engineering, a well-planned life-cycle analysis and
cost/benefit analysis should be conducted to justify the reverse engineering
projects. Reverse engineering is typically cost effective only if the items to be
reverse engineered reflect a high investment or will be reproduced in large
quantities. Reverse engineering of a part may be attempted even if it is not cost
effective, if the part is absolutely required and is mission-critical to a system.
Reverse engineering of mechanical parts involves acquiring three-dimensional
position data in the point cloud using laser scanners or computed tomography
(CT). Representing geometry of the part in terms of surface points is the first
step in creating parametric surface patches. A good polymesh is created from
the point cloud using reverse engineering software. The cleaned-up polymesh,
NURBS (Non-uniform rational B-spline) curves, or NURBS surfaces are exported to
CAD packages for further refinement, analysis, and generation of cutter tool
paths for CAM. Finally, the CAM produces the physical part.
It can be said that reverse engineering begins with the product and works
through the design process in the opposite direction to arrive at a product
definition statement (PDS). In doing so, it uncovers as much information as
possible about the design ideas that were used to produce a particular product.